Dain grew up a really long time ago in South Carolina. It was such a long time ago that he doesn't like to talk about it, because in his capacity as a chopper pilot for the PPDC, he is constantly surrounded by snot-nosed brats that make him feel about a thousand years old. So it's really enough to know that he grew up in South Carolina, and his mother's family was old money and didn't really approve of her hippie husband. Said hippie husband corrupted her mind and the two of them named their three children (two boys and a girl) after characters from Tolkien's books. Dain figures he and his brother (Bard) got off pretty easy in that respect, and does not envy his sister, Luthien even a little bit.

Dain was a crazy sort of kid. His friends pretty quickly learned not to dare him to do anything, because as soon as someone gave him an excuse, Dain would do just about anything. He's broken most everything in his body at least once, but still manages to be pretty sprightly. One of his teachers, concerned, suggested that he might consider the military, as it would give him some structure and discipline. What Dain heard was "GO FLY DANGEROUS PLANES IN THE AIR FORCE, YEAH!!!" and that's exactly what he did.

After graduating from the Air Force Academy with a degree in aerospace engineering, Dain entered the test pilot program and proceeded to thoroughly enjoy risking his life on a regular basis. He got married twice and divorced twice and had a pair of kids that he loved to death and rarely got to see. (He named them Maggie and David. Nice and normal.) It was a good life, all in all.

He was on the verge of retirement when K-Day happened. His ex-wife (the one he was on good terms with, the mother of his children) begged him to stay out of it, but he signed up as soon as the PPDC started taking people. At first he flew relief missions, shuttled doctors back and forth, dropped supplies, but when the Jaeger program took off, he was assigned to Atom Bombshell as the lead pilot in her deployment team. He got along with the young pilots, Andi and Chris, and came to care for them deeply.

Dain was spotting for them when they fought Interloper. Bombshell got torn up pretty badly and Dain, against protocol, turned over control to his co-pilot and lowered himself down to the conn-pod while another Jaeger distracted the kaiju. He rescued Chris and Andi, turned them over to EMTs as the Shatterdome, and was promptly reassigned.

He's been shuttled around from one duty assignment to another, and they've finally stuck him in Alaska to help ferry the new Jaegers to their forever homes.